O Captain! Our Captain!

There’s a line in the Aeneid where a heartbroken Aeneas steels himself to tell his shipwrecked compatriots that a time will come when they will look back with fondness on their misfortunes. 

'My friends, this is not the first trouble we have known,’ he says in the West translation I read back in UCD thirty years ago. ‘We have suffered worse before, and this too will pass. God will see to it. You have been to Scylla's cave and heard the mad dogs howling in the depths of it. You have even survived rocks thrown by the Cyclops. So summon up your courage once again. This is no time for gloom or fear. The day will come, perhaps, when it will give you pleasure to remember even this. Whatever chance may bring, however many hardships we suffer, we are making for Latium, where the Fates show us our place of rest. There it is the will of God that the kingdom of Troy shall rise again. Your task is to endure and save yourselves for better days.'

I’ve been thinking of this a lot since Saturday, when I got the shocking news that Vic Connerty had died. These few days have been ones where deep sorrow has mingled with gratitude, and the thought that I’ve been so lucky to have been taught and guided by Vic, and to have known him for so long as a friend.

It’s strange to think back to to those magnificent lectures in UCD where Vic could cast his spell over a packed Theatre L, the 450 or so students who were meant to be there bolstered by cohorts who’d come over from the faculties of Engineering, Science, and Architecture to hear Vic tell us about the Gracchi, of Marius and his seven consulships, of Sulla, Pompey, Caesar, and the constant fatal relationship of land and the army. Despite how many wonderful lecturers there were in the Arts faculty at that time - I had a lot of great ones across Greek and Roman Civilization, History, and one year of English - it’s hardly surprising that when thousands of UCD alumni were polled a dozen or so years back and asked who their favourite lecturer had been, Vic was the winner for the 1990s.

Starting second year I met my tutor from first year, the lovely Jane McEntaggart, who said Mr Connerty wanted to meet me, so when I spotted him in a stairway a few days later I nervously approached him. We were talking in no time at all about my working in the pub in Palmerstown, about the comics convention I’d been at in London because I’d wanted back then to be a comic artist, and about how he and my mum had both moved here from Liverpool within a couple of years. Within a a week or so the tutorial lists were up and I was thrilled to see that I was in his group, along with Valerie who I’d known from the previous year, Claire who’s still a dear friend to this day, Joanne, Paula, Johanna, Gerry, Jacqui, and Suzanne. And so began a year of such wonderful memories, anecdotes, lessons, and ideas. Too many to share, though I’ll never forget in particular how Vic told us of the last words attributed to the emperor Vespasian, distracted from the canonical “I think I’m becoming a God” by the sight of a rainbow apparently ending in the bushes of Belfield.

Small wonder, then, that I did his third-year course on the decade of the Triumvirate, immersed in Caesar, Cicero, Plutarch, and others, letting the ancients speak for themselves, even if we viewed them at times with sceptical eyes. And even now I can’t but think of those classes without hearing Vic’s warmly growling voice with that unforgettable cadence, quoting Cicero’s “to listen to him you’d think he lived in Plato’s Republic, and not in the sink of Romulus.”

And so the following year I started my Master’s and became a tutor under Vic’s mentorship, making a host of friendships I still am so lucky to have, even if we’ve lost a few since: poor Renate passed on a couple of years ago, and Carine died just a few months back. Vic would be my boss whether tutoring or invigilating, my supervisor when Andrew Erskine was away in Munich, and most importantly my friend through the decades of his retirement: I was so glad to be able to build my first flexi-day off from my current job around one of our regular coffee meetings at Dunne and Crescenzi, there to talk of life and academia and the very different fortunes of our respective Merseyside football clubs. I’d never have imagined it would be our last coffee meeting, or that seeing him at UCD’s Classical Society Inaugural a couple of months back would be our last meeting of any sort.

In truth, countless people could tell stories like mine: when one of my friends shared the news of his death on Facebook she began with the words “O Captain! My Captain!” I’d had those words - whether thought of as Walt Whitman’s, or Robin Williams’s, or Ethan Hawke’s - in my head ever since Tom had sent me the news, and I’m sure there are so many others who could say the same.

I want to say that the world is darker today, but Vic’s was a fire that lit thousands of candles. One of my friends described him the other day as a champion of the ancient world who exemplified how to be a person in the modern world, and this is surely right: his warmth, his wisdom, his curiosity, and his deep care for people are things that will surely stay with me and so many others as long as we live. May he rest in peace.

Silos and synods

I was at a conference in Rome a few years ago where people from Google explained that Catholic websites tend to punch well below their weight compared to those of other religious groups for the simple reason that they don’t link to other sites; in the digital environment as so often in the world at large today, Catholicism is a siloed landscape. It doesn’t have to be, though. Even just thinking about Irish history, and the kind of lessons we might draw from our most influential period, those centuries between the coming of Patrick and the Viking attacks when we supposedly saved civilization – we didn’t, but we did a lot – it shouldn’t take long for us to realise just how important networks and networking were to ‘the land of saints and scholars’.

That won’t typically be our first thought, of course. We’re far more likely to think of the likes of the island monastery of Skellig Michael. Famously isolated, the stone huts on the pyramidal island are dramatically inaccessible, so much so that they were perfectly cast in recent Star Wars films as Luke Skywalker’s hermit hideout. This very inaccessibility, this remoteness – the monastery is high on a rugged rocky spike that arises from stormy waters that cut the island off from the south-western corner of the Irish mainland – defines the monastery, but can too easily mislead us into thinking that this kind of community was somehow typical of Irish Christianity in its earliest centuries. Anything but!

That’s not to say that there weren’t Celtic monks who went off into the wilderness to seek God through contemplation – the Cambrai Homily, written around AD700, speaks of this ‘green martyrdom’, as distinct from the classical red martyrdom of those who died for the Faith and the white martyrdom of those who left their homelands to become missionary exiles – but we go wildly astray if we ever think of this as the norm. On the contrary: in the first centuries of our recorded history the Irish countryside was dotted with hundreds, even thousands, of monasteries, and while some certainly were discreet centres of contemplation, many others had roles that were pastoral, administrative, scholarly, and evangelising. They were platforms for outreach, and they were linked together.

Clonmacnoise, established by St Ciarán where the river Shannon meets the great road that was the Esker Riada, is perhaps the most obvious of these, but even when we think of the ostensibly remote beauty of Glendalough, we should keep in mind that though St Kevin settled in a beautiful spot in the Wicklow Mountains, he hardly did so in an obscure one; the monastic city that grew up around him is, after all, barely a mile from the crossroads of Laragh. St Cronán is famously described in his medieval biography as having moved his community to Roscrea because people couldn’t find it in its original home. ‘I will not be in a desert place where guests and poor people cannot easily find me,’ he supposedly said, continuing, ‘but I will stay here now in a public place.’

Our early lives of St Brigid show her travelling around the roads of central Ireland by chariot, praying as she went like an efficient commuter, and even helping her people in the building of a road, designed to carry chariots and wagons even across bog and riverside swamps. They describe her too as paying careful attention to how Mass was celebrated in Rome, so the prayers could change in Ireland if they changed in Rome, while contemporary letters from the likes of St Columbanus underline how letters and appeals to Rome were indeed a real phenomenon for the Celtic saints.

Roads, rivers, and letters all served to bind communities together, and communities would be aware too of their familial links – not merely because they’d often be expressions of local tribes and kingdoms, but because they’d be part of loose familial federations, known as paruchia, deriving from particular founder saints and those with whom he or she had studied. These federations could cross the sea, or even straddle the continent. Not that all was harmonious in or between these paruchia, of course – families can be tricky things, after all – but there were links, and the links mattered.

What’s more, the monastic leaders would travel to meet with each and learn from each other, and could come together occasionally in gatherings called synods. One synod from AD 697 begot the Cáin Adomnán, attempting to ban violence in warfare against non-combatants and especially women, for instance, while another, known as the Synod of Patrick, issued more than thirty rulings, including ones banning the receipt of donations from pagans and  threatening excommunication against anyone who believed in vampires!

Coming from the Greek syn-odos, meaning a shared journey or even a common path, synods are things we hear a lot about in Church circles nowadays, with talk of synods, synodality, synodal paths, and synodal ways. In the end, though, we should realise that they are, above all else, antidotes to siloed landscapes, a way of helping give reality and life to the Church as a network of networks. If St Brigid helped build roads across bogs, it must in part have been because without such ways – without such common paths – our monasteries would have been isolated and ineffective. Like the proverbial lighthouse in a bog, they’d have been brilliant but useless.

If synodality does nothing more than keep people talking together and praying together and working together towards common ends, it will have achieved something. Networks matter, after all.

Samildánach

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about specialisation, about picking one area and being known for being great at one thing. I’m not sure about this, though, because to take a pointer from Archilochus, the world surely needs foxes as much as it needs hedgehogs. One of the great insights in medical practice over recent decades has been that for all the status that accords to consultants, general practitioners are experts too: general practice is a specialism, as being good at many things is a remarkable gift, a speciality in its own right. Sometimes jacks of all trades are indeed masters of none, but sometimes too they are masters of many.

This reality has been recognised for millennia through the repository of human wisdom that is the world’s myths and legends, of course. Back in the seventh century BC Homer famously described Odysseus as polytropos – a word literally meaning ‘of many turnings’ – and also as polymētis (‘many-skilled’) and poikilomētis (‘dapple-skilled’). Even more than Achilles, the intense and shortlived hero of the Iliad, the hero of the Odyssey is a figure who excels in all manner of fields. As H.D.F. Kitto put it in a passage so memorably quoted in Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance:

‘Thus the hero of the Odyssey is a great fighter, a wily schemer, a ready speaker, a man of stout heart and broad wisdom who knows that he must endure without too much complaining what the gods send; and he can both build and sail a boat, drive a furrow as straight as anyone, beat a young braggart at throwing the discus, challenge the Pheacian youth at boxing, wrestling or running; flay, skin, cut up and cook an ox, and be moved to tears by song.  He is in fact an excellent all-rounder; he has surpassing arēte.’

Irish legend has made the same point since time immemorial, with one of its most remarkable figures being the mercurial Lugh, hero of the wars against the Fomorians and eventual father of Cuchulainn. Lugh would be famously known as Samildánach  –  ‘equally skilled in many arts’, the story of how he came to Tara underlining how wide-ranging his abilities were. As told in the medieval Second Battle of Moytura, it goes something like this:

One day, after Bres the traitor had been banished and Nuada was once more king, the Tuatha Dé Danann were feasting and celebrating at Tara when a young and handsome warrior arrived at the palace’s gate. 

‘Who are you?’ asked Gamal and Camall, the palace doorkeepers. 

‘I am Lugh Long-arm,’ the young man answered, ‘son of Cian son of Diancecht and of Ethne, daughter of Balor, fosterson of Eochaidh and Tailtiu, daughter of the King of Spain.’

‘And what can you do? No one without an art enters Tara.’

‘Try me. I am a carpenter,’ said Lugh. 

‘Then we don’t need you. We have a carpenter already – Luchta son of Luachaid.’

‘I’m a smith too,’ said Lugh.

‘We also have a smith – Colum Cualleinech of the three new processes.’

‘I am a champion.’

‘We don’t need one! Ogma son of Ethliu is our champion.’

‘I’m a harper as well.’

‘We have a harper already, Abcan son of Bicelmos, who we chose in the fairy-mounds.’

‘Well, I am a hero.’

‘We’ve no need of one – Bresal is our hero.’

‘I am a poet, and I am a historian.’

‘En son of Ethaman is our poet and historian.’

‘I’m also a sorcerer.’ 

‘Sure, we’ve no shortage of sorcerers!’

‘I am a healer.’

‘No need. Diancecht is our healer.’

‘I am a cup-bearer too.’

‘We have nine of those already!’

‘I’m even a metalworker, skilled at working in brass.’

‘We don’t need you – Credne Cerd is already our brazier.’

Lugh paused, and then said: ‘Ask the king whether he has a single man in his whole household who has all these skills. If he has, I will not enter.’

And so Lugh was welcomed to Tara, where he became the greatest of the Tuatha Dé Danaan, and was known henceforth as Samildánach, for he had many skills. 

Sometimes a breadth of expertise and the vision that comes with that is the skill we are slowest to recognise, but it can be the most valuable skill of all.

Colonists

I saw yesterday that this year’s Dublin Handelfest is being advertised, and perhaps unsurprisingly I felt that same ambivalent twinge of troubled anticipation I felt last year. The festival is great, with concerts and tours and exhibitions, but too often celebrations of Handel’s Dublin sojourn, like the city’s Georgian architecture or writers like Swift and Goldsmith, go hand-in-hand with nonsense about the eighteenth century as the capital’s golden age.

Such claims only make sense if we only care about our elites, the 3% of the population who could vote and who lived in the houses we admire today. They only make sense if we disregard the vast majority of the city’s population, the mass of urban poor who lived in destitute slums, the thousands of beggars, the thousands of prostitutes, the thousands who died in the freezing famine that killed up to a fifth of the population between 1740 and 1741 in what history would record as the 'Year of Slaughter'. They only make sense if we disregard the regular riots of the urban poor that the army was called upon to suppress time and again. They only make sense if we disregard the fact that the Kingdom of Ireland was what we would now call an apartheid state, one where the country’s Catholic majority were barely tolerated, their most basic rights curtailed and denied, discreet chapels only allowed in Dublin at all when riots were feared after a house where Mass was being celebrated collapsed, killing the celebrant and nine of those worshipping. If we disregard the violence, the robbery, the overcrowding, the typhus, the open sewers.

Pádraig Daly, the Augustinian priest-poet, has a poem called ‘Colonists’, in which he reflects on how we might be tempted to celebrate the domestic glories of those who colonised Africa. It’s not long, so I may as well quote it in full:

What hits you as strongly as the first blast

Of African heat

Is their absolute presumption,

Dividing out a land

Others had wandered since forever,

Erecting fences across the paths of hippo, zebra, lion,

Calling rivers for themselves and their bloated queens,

Corrupting the names of hollows and mountainranges,

Terming the old uncouth,

Patronising,

Slaughtering, 

Teaching servitude.

The beauty they achieved in their houses

And sweeps of trees

Is by the by.

I’m not saying the beauties and glories the elite of Georgian Dublin enjoyed amongst the squalor and sorrow of those they’d dispossessed and oppressed are ‘by the by’ -- we can, after all, enjoy them now. And, in truth, we may as well take advantage of whatever good that shower did. There was precious little of it, after all, compared to the harm they inflicted. But still: let’s not pretend this was a Golden Age; what gold there was shone among the blood and filth of a boot-trodden charnel pit.

Explorations

The river Boyne is tidal outside our house, rising and falling as it ebbs and flows with the salty waters of the Irish Sea. The water can drop to a few inches at times, revealing wide gravel beds and even — to the eagle-eyed — the outlines of a few ancient oak canoes, sunk six thousand years ago when the great solar tomb of Newgrange was being built beyond the bend of the river, and now at risk of being trampled and destroyed by the horses that have taken to exploring. It's navigable, though, at least for small boats when the tide is in, and if you want you can even hire traditional skin-and-wood currachs to row along the river now. 

Such a boat, I suppose, would have been used by the monks who sailed along the river at the dawn of Ireland's Christian era when the Boyne was one of Ireland’s main transport routes, and the story goes that a group of such monks were passing by in the late fifth century when they were flagged down by a man who lived by the banks of the river facing where I live now. His wife and he had a baby boy, he said; would the monks baptise him for them? They could not, they said, because the salty waters of the sea were not the fresh living waters needed for baptism. But, they added, God would provide. And so they came ashore, and one took the child, and placed him on the ground just a few yards from the riverbank, and fresh water bubbled up from the ground where he lay, and so the boy Buíthe, or Boyce, was Christened.

Such at least is the story that was told centuries later, in a medieval life from the twelfth century or thereabouts, seemingly based on earlier accounts that told how St Buíthe, for so he’d become known, studied in Wales and on the continent, and set up a monastery by the Boyne, acting as a miraculous channel of God’s power time and again along the way. On one occasion, for instance, he’s said to have parted the waters of the Boyne so he could cross it and prevent the execution of one of the king’s prisoners. He arrived too late, but was able to restore the executed man to life, and then took him to his monastery, where he would henceforth work. That was one of the more curious roles of monasteries in early Christian Ireland — they could be like open prisons where men who would otherwise be hunted down and executed could find sanctuary, as long as they lived like monks.

Buíthe is best known now for the great monastery named after him he founded a few miles inland at Monasterboice. Site of a majestic round tower and two of the most impressive high crosses in the country, it would be a major ecclesiastical centre until it slipped into insignificance when the new Cistercian abbey of Mellifont was built a few miles away in the middle of the twelfth century. Mellifont, it seems, may have taken its name as a nod to the site of Buíthe’s baptism, the ‘sweet spring’ that flowed with fresh water just yards from the salty Boyne.

I’ve known about this for a while now, but it was only today, following an afternoon of errands in town, that I decided it was time to wander about the place of Buíthe’s baptism for myself, setting foot in the field I’ve been looking over the river at for four years.

Off I headed down Trinity Street into Mell, sheltering from a sudden shower in the little parish Church of St Joseph and accidentally joining in Adoration as I did. I couldn’t see any sign there of the sixteenth-century window and Romanesque arch that were discovered there during expansion work at the start of the last century, though, relics of the time it housed a small community of Cistercians after Henry VIII and his lackeys closed the abbeys. They hung on a while, retaining the title of abbots of Mellifont, but never returned to the monastery.

After Adoration, with the rain having passed, I turned down the narrow, hedge-flanked Toberboice Lane in search of the eponymous well, ‘Toberboice’ coming from the Irish word ‘tobar’, meaning well or spring, and the name Buíthe. On the way I wondered where exactly it was that archaeologists had found early Christian graves beside the lane forty years ago, along with two underground storage tunnels and evidence of an enclosure, all pointing to a small monastic community. There were thousands of these across Ireland in the early middle ages, but that doesn’t make it any less exciting to find or be in one.

 

The lane ends at a small compound, a printing factory and a repair shop for cars. Nobody knew anything about the well, but I’d looked on nineteenth-century maps and it was clearly there, off the south-west corner of what’s now the repair yard. Had it been covered up? Certainly back in the day it was used to supply water for a local brewery, piping it there through wooden pipes. 

Over the gate into the next field, so, squelching through the hoof-churned mud, and then there! There it was! A small bridge over a cut trench with a little stream of water running along it behind the repair yard, and beside the bridge the trench lined with small rocks, a deliberate attempt at building some kind of structure from where people could draw water back in the day. That was it, so, Buíthe’s well — and our apartment quite visible from it across the rushes and the river. Mission accomplished. I’m not sure why, but it didn’t occur to me to ask for his intercession. Next time, so. It’s surely good to have a local saint in this way.

I was tempted for a moment to follow the muddy horse-churned path between the rushes to the river’s edge, but instead I turned to examine the ruined house I’d somehow not even noticed till this morning. Back in the nineteenth century it was believed that the two-storey house at the end of Toberboice Lane housed an upstairs cupboard that had been used as a priest hole for hiding clergy in penal times; this ruin must have been the house in question, with an upper window testifying to the upper storey. 

Time, then, to go home, content. Sometimes, in our eagerness to think of where we’re going, and constant cries to be mindful of where we are, it’s too easy to forget where we’ve come from. Today, though, was for remembering, looking backward to inspiration and guidance in going forward. And all within sight of my home.

Somewhere on screen

There’s a passage in The Moviegoer where Walker Percy has the narrator muse on what he calls ‘certification’.

‘Nowadays when a person lives somewhere, in a neighbourhood, the place is not certified for him,’ he observes. ‘More than likely he will live there sadly and the emptiness which is inside him will expand until it evacuates the entire neighbourhood. But if he sees a movie which shows his very neighbourhood, it becomes possible for him to live, for a time at least, as a person who is Somewhere and not Anywhere.’

I got to thinking of that over the last week, with the Oscar attempts of The Banshees of Inisherin and the almost impossibly good An Cailín Ciúin, and me remembering how excited we used to get about any films at all being shot in Ireland. They were rarities, or felt to be so, and just as we all knew that The Spy Who Came in from the Cold saw Smithfield standing in for Berlin, Excalibur was filmed in Wicklow, and Educating Rita was shot all over Dublin, so we were doubly thrilled to see films that were set here. I mean, Eat the Peach was a film people seemed to talk about endlessly when I was small. ‘Eat the Peach’, I tell you, about a couple of lads in Kildare building a ‘wall of death’ for motorbikes.

This was long before Tom Hanks was storming the beaches at Enniscorthy, mind, never mind Luke Skywalker living his best hermit life off the Kerry coast.

I wonder if it’s related to something a friend of mine from Pittsburg used to notice in his years studying in Dublin. He’d find it baffling that Irish people would be proud of things he’d take for granted. ‘How do you know that?’ he’d ask. ‘Irish people always do this -- I’ll mention Jaws or something, and somebody will always throw me that an Irish person was second-unit cameraman on it or something. How do you know this? And why do you care?’

We’re a small country, one that’s somehow got both a village mentality and a exile one, where there’s a sense that everyone knows people and should be able to connect with people, but also an awareness that we’re scattered all over the world. I think that twin mentality may probably be combining with a desire to be able to prove that somehow we matter -- that we have gone places, and that we have done things. A big chunk of our history, after all, is a history of things being done to the Irish more so than by the Irish, with culture, language, religion, and even the basic necessities for sustenance all having been attacked. I suspect that in any society where there’s a sense of somehow having survived with just shadows of your heritage, an excitement about being recognised globally as Somewhere is probably inevitable.

Biggar, but far from better

A frustrating article in The Irish Times by Nigel Biggar has driven me back to my files and something I'd written about three, three-and-a-half years ago; I attach it below.

The latest piece is sheer sophistry, and historically dodgy sophistry at that. It takes real disingenuity — or laziness — to dismiss this speech as an example of President Higgins having drunk too deeply at the wells of postmodern and postcolonial theory, despite it being clearly steeped and informed by a deep knowledge of Irish history and Irish history under British rule.

And what do you do with a statement as horrendous as 'Said’s claim that empire invariably involves cultural repression does not readily accommodate the fact that the renaissance of Irish language and literature with Yeats, Synge and Hyde occurred within the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland'? Given that the only reason that there was a need for such a renaissance was the cultural repression of the native Irish over centuries of British rule, British rule that saw the country's population reduced by as much as a fifth on three occasions between 1640 and 1850, or that the three people he cites were all Anglo-Irish writers, people hardly representative of those whose culture had been crushed...

The whole article is utter rot, and I can't be bothered trawling through it again. I'm just left, reading it, baffled that Nigel Biggar is seen as an authority on morals. I'm not even sure what that is, tbh: I'd have thought that experts on morals should simply be good people.

I have very serious issues with President Higgins's take on ethical remembering, as I think he tends not to get even close to the high standards he calls for, but his thinking about this — as, for example, here and in the video linked above — and his willingness to engage with Irish violence in the causes of nationalism and imperialism, is genuinely impressive, and far above those of Prof. Biggar.

* * *

I should begin, I suppose, by pointing out that my views on the United Kingdom have shifted since the Scottish referendum of 2014. Although there were those who misunderstood my concerns about provoking nationalist sentiments in Scots otherwise content with a British identity as support – even as cheerleading – for independence, I was far from convinced of the case for it at the time.

As I said then to a few people, it ultimately smacked to me of that bleakly selfish cry from Lewis’s final Narnia book: “The dwarfs are for the dwarfs!”

Brexit has changed this, and in particular the handling of the Brexit referendum by the British parliament has changed this. There is, I believe, nothing wrong with referendums, but they need to be anchored in proper constitutional systems where their role and status is clear, and where flawed ones can be overturned.

None of this has been the case with the 2016 Brexit referendum, where most people seemed unaware of its advisory character, where politicians are treating a wafer-thin majority as an unassailable directive, and where the vote was won in a way that in Ireland’s case would at least cause the Supreme Court to consider whether it should be rerun.

More to the point, Brexit has shown that even if the Scots, Welsh, and Northern Irish vote as one, a solid English majority in referendums would be enough to force them into positions they do not want, especially if MPs will abandon the Burkean ideal of voting in line with the conscience in the interests of the country as a whole in favour of one where they act simply as voters’ delegates. It has demonstrated, if there were any question about the issue, that if there’s ever a solid majority in England, the other parts of the UK must simply accept the will of the English.

This might not matter especially to those who define themselves primarily as ‘British’, but for those who don’t, Brexit laid bare the realities of the modern United Kingdom, such that if I were Scottish I think I would almost certainly now vote to dissolve the union. Scotland, I would think, should not be an English vassal.

(I would, of course, always have favoured Irish reunification, and increased reading combined with the callous disregard for the North shown through the Brexit debate, along with the willingness of the UK government to use it as a pawn to pressurise Ireland with has, if anything, confirmed me in that view, such that I’m afraid there’s no way that I could ever fully support any group dedicated to maintaining the UK as it currently stands. The principle of consent is key when it comes to Northern Ireland, of course: we’re bound by treaty to the fact that Irish reunification won’t happen till there’s a majority for it on both sides of the Irish border, and I firmly believe that this is as it should be.)

These Islands

That said, to ‘These Islands’ and to Nigel Biggar.

I don’t know if you saw the Irish journalist Naomi O’Reilly’s comment on ‘These Islands’ this morning, but she made a very valid point in saying “’These islands’ was a perfectly good euphemism until these lads came along,” with the UCD historian Conor Mulvagh observing that it offers “a great insight into the fragile, confused, mostly white, mostly male, and misty-eyed world of modern day paternalistic unionism”.

I’d not go anywhere near that far, and have been defending the effort, pointing out to people that it is clearly far better to try to put forward a positive case for continued unity than to simply try to scare the Scots – or indeed the Northern Irish – into staying. I think this is a very difficult enterprise, of course, not least as there are circles that need squaring in terms of comparing and contrasting the current unions with Scotland and Northern Ireland and the historical one with Ireland.

And then there’s the name.

‘These islands’ is a term that pops up on a regular basis in documents drawn up by the Irish and UK governments, and– is a deliberately euphemistic term, intended by the British to be polite and by the Irish to avoid any suggestion of British ownership or dominion. The term ‘British Isles’ is in fact offensive to many – though by no means all – Irish people, and as Norman Davies observes in the introduction to his 1999 book The Isles: A History, “The Isles ceased to be British precisely 50 years ago, when the Republic of Ireland left the Commonwealth, though few people in the British residue have yet cared to notice.”

A universally acceptable name for this archipelago seems to elude people: ‘British isles’ is far too loaded; the historically ancient ‘Pretannic Isles’ sounds like an absurdly antiquarian venture; ‘Islands of the North Atlantic’ rather ignores the reality of – for example – Iceland; nobody seems to want the ‘Celtic Isles’ or ‘Anglo-Celtic Isles’ even if Ireland, Scotland, and Wales together take up more space than England does; ‘West European Isles’ is slightly clunky and could irk those Britons who don’t see themselves as European; and ‘Britain and Ireland’ skips the likes of the Isle of Man and the offshore islands.

‘These Islands’, of course, can’t work from an external viewpoint, but at least when talking among ourselves it works well as a good way of referring to these islands in a politically neutral way: these islands would be ‘These Islands’ regardless of what political structures existed within and across the islands, heedless of borders, monarchies, and republics.

All of which makes it a problematic term for a think-tank or advocacy group dedicated to maintaining the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland, as it appropriates a deliberately broad, generous, and neutral non-political term and deploys it towards a specific, narrow, and highly political end, and does so in a way that suggests that Irish attitudes to this don’t matter.

 

Nigel Biggar and the ‘British’ Irish

Certainly, that notion seems to underpin all too clearly Nigel Biggar’s essay ‘What the United Kingdom is good for’, which less than a couple of paragraphs into its more than 5,000 words baldly states that the Irish are British.

Three paragraphs later, then, we’re told that the UK is a multinational state, comprising a union of peoples who have maintained their own national customs and has either retained or acquired its own institutions; bizarrely, he states that the “Welsh language flourishes far more strongly in Wales than Irish language does in the independent Republic across the water” without acknowledging how it was during the relatively brief period that the whole of Ireland was in the UK that the Irish language was almost totally extinguished , and then goes on to claim that “Northern Ireland has enjoyed its own legislative assembly much longer than either Wales or Scotland”.

This is a straightforward falsehood, even if we put aside how the Northern Assembly hasn’t met since January. The Northern Ireland Assembly first met on 1 July 1998, less than a year before the first sittings of the Scottish Parliament and the National Assembly for Wales, both of which first sat on 12 May 1999.

It is possible, I suppose, that Prof. Biggar is trying to suggest that the Northern Ireland Assembly is the same thing as the Parliament of Northern Ireland that was abolished in 1973. Given how the two entities are fundamentally different, however, and how the old Stormont parliament was a gerrymandered institution that maintained a one-party state where Catholics were systematically discriminated against, the entire system being sustained by the Westminster government, such that it’s hardly a model for how the UK is a successful union of respected peoples, I hope this isn’t what Prof. Biggar had in mind.

It’s rather strange too to read that “so flexibly successful has our union been that the thought of violent conflict erupting (again) between its constituent peoples is almost unimaginable” – it’s almost as though he’s not paying attention to how the Northern Irish peace process has been in trouble for the last couple of years or to the dangers Brexit poses to that process.

A peculiar take on the Troubles

His take on the ‘Troubles’ is most peculiar, not least in how he describes it as a case of how “history can sometimes roll alarmingly backwards”, and sums it up as something that happened when grievances of Catholic nationalists against discrimination “erupted into civil protest in the late 1960s and then, on the part of a republican minority, into physical violence in the early 1970s”, with the British government then seeking, “not only to contain and suppress the violence, but also to address the economic and social grievances”.

Reading this, one might almost think that Prof. Biggar is unaware of how anti-Catholic pogroms had long been part and parcel of the Northern Ireland experience, how the civil rights movement had been met by an intensification of these pogroms, attacks from the Royal Irish Constabulary, and of anti-Catholic violence in general, and how the British army was originally sent in not primarily to suppress violent Republicans but to protect Catholics from their Protestant neighbours.

(In fact, to read this, there’s not even a mention of how what would become Northern Ireland was carved out from Ireland at gunpoint over 1912-1914, how it was sustained by gerrymandering, discrimination, and the violence and intimidation of Catholics by Protestant, and how loyalist terrorism was a staple of the Troubles throughout, with the vast majority of civilians killed in that civil war being Catholics killed by the unionist terrorists simply for being Catholic.)

“After the IRA had been fought to a standstill, the republican leadership and most of their followers agreed to swap the bullet for the ballot in the Good Friday Agreement of 1998,” Prof. Biggar declares, in a Telegraph-Mail-Times-Spectator version of history that ignores firstly how effective the IRA was through the 1990s – one thinks of the 1991 mortar attack on Downing Street and the 1996 bombings of Canary Wharf and Manchester – and more importantly moves to swap the bullet for the ballot began for the Republican leadership in the 1980s, long before “the IRA had been fought to a standstill”, whatever that means.

This process actually began quite early in the 1980s, it’s worth noting, but began to get real teeth from 1987 on, with the Irish government and the priests of Clonard Monastery working with John Hume to get Gerry Adams to rein in the IRA and stop nationalist violence.

“In return, London agreed to cede Dublin a role in upholding the interests of Catholics in Northern Ireland,” Prof. Biggar says, apparently oblivious to how this had been the case since 1985’s Anglo-Irish Agreement, as well as “to establish a power-sharing constitution, to reform the police service, and to respect the result of any future popular referendum on Irish unification.”

This leaves out a lot, but rather than going into that, it’s worth looking at what he sees as the moral argument against Irish reunification: it’s an important part of his thesis, not least as it rests on points he’s made in the past against Ireland’s independence struggle a century ago and how it shares a common thesis with his argument against Scottish independence.

 

Against an independent Ireland?

Prof. Biggar lays out three moral tests, claiming that the risks that attend political divorce can only be justified if motivating grievances are serious, chronic, and current. “To enter upon the risks of divorce for grievances that are trivial, temporary, and in the past would,” he says, “be reckless and imprudent and therefore morally wrong.”

It’s worth remembering how in January 2016, speaking in one of Dublin’s Anglican cathedrals, Prof. Biggar laid out a similar test to claim that the Irish independence struggle that began at Easter 1916 would not have passed the test of being a just war since “the British-dominated government in Dublin, against which the rebels took up arms, was not persisting in grave injustice”.

It’s true that historians such as Roy Foster have made the case that the Irish of 1916 were not oppressed as their ancestors had been; this is clear. However, to say that the Westminster government was not persisting in grave injustice is a different matter.

In the first place, since the 1870s there had consistently been overwhelming democratic support across Ireland for autonomy within the UK – in a sense this was the revival of a movement that was derailed by the Famine – with this being obstructed in numerous ways from Britain.

It was only the Irish Parliamentary Party holding the balance of power that had forced the British Liberals to offer Home Rule to Ireland, with this in turn being derailed by the Conservative-backed militarisation of Ulster’s Protestant community, their threats of war being indulged by Westminster and with a reluctant plan to suppress them if need be being dropped when British army officers threatened to resign their commissions.

The upshot of all this, of course, is that Westminster decided in 1914 to treat Ireland as two separate polities, which it had not hitherto been, and to partition the country on largely confessional lines, retaining the wealthiest part of the country within the UK and ensuring it would have an enduring loyalist majority.

It was, it’s worth pointing out, British unwillingness to accede to the popular will in Ireland over the 1912-1914 period that saw the Home Rule-supporting Patrick Pearse become a violent republican, and that caused the Irish hierarchy to become disenchanted with the Home Rule project, such that the Church would be broadly on board with calls for a national independence movement as the First World War progressed.

With 1920’s Government of Ireland Act, Britain’s willingness to split Ireland was realised, with two Catholic-majority counties being included in the new ‘Northern Ireland’ and with treaty talks only beginning with Nationalist rebels when the Northern parliament had begun to sit. The state that is now known as Ireland is, in reality, what was left after Westminster had given the Ulster Protestants their own gerrymandered statelet.

Ronan Fanning’s Fatal Path is superb on this whole period, and really brings home  the extent to which Ireland was in many ways a mere pawn in the games of British party politics that busied people in Westminster; comparisons with Brexit are, if we’re paying attention, unavoidable.

(Neither does Prof. Biggar seem willing to countenance whether Irish farmers paying the British government annuities for land the British had confiscated from the Irish was itself fundamentally unfair, or whether the condemning of Ireland to provincial irrelevance through the 1800 Acts of Union had denied the bulk of the country an industrial revolution, leaving it impoverished and bereft of investment even into the 20th Century.)

Against a reunited Ireland?

Still, for Prof. Biggar, who at least has recognised that under the Good Friday Agreement a referendum could see Ireland reunified, voting for this to happen is only morally justifiable if his tests are met.

“Whether or not it is right that Northern Ireland should secede from the UK should not be determined by the political exploitation of historic, self-romanticising Irish nationalist hostility to the British,” he says. “Rather, it should depend on whether the UK government has in fact shown itself willing and able to right the wrongs that Catholic nationalists have suffered, whether the one million-strong Protestant unionist population consent to be absorbed into the Irish republic, and whether that republic is ready to pay the costs of absorbing them.”

None of these tests are met, he says, but whatever about the last one, the first two are pretty spurious. What does he mean by saying that reunification would only be moral with the consent of the Protestant population? Does he mean all of them? Or does he mean most of them? And is he including as Protestants the people who claim to be of no religion, because if not his figures are very wrong – 2011 figures point to there being three quarters of a million non-Catholic Christians in Northern Ireland, with there only being 14,500 more non-Catholics than Catholics. The Good Friday Agreement simply requires a majority of people in Northern Ireland to be on board for reunification to happen, so it would be quite a shifting of goalposts to demand that that majority also include a majority of Protestant unionists.

The first one still remains very much in doubt: it ignores the question of whether the sundering of Ireland was itself a historical injustice perpetuated and sustained by Britain, it ignores the question of whether by pursuing its current Brexit campaign the British government is perpetuating fresh wrongs against the Irish on both sides of the border, and it ignores British government reluctance to investigate seriously widespread and well-substantiated allegations of collusion between loyalist terrorists and the British state apparatus throughout the troubles along with a reluctance to compensate properly the victims of such violence or to prosecute its perpetrators.

As for Scotland?

It’s worth turning again to Prof. Biggar’s criteria for whether the Scots, say, would be justified in seeking independence. The motivating grievances for independence, he maintains, must be serious rather than trivial, chronic not temporary, and current not historic.

The first criterion is a subjective one, of course; what the Scots might consider serious, the English might think trivial, or vice versa.

The second criterion is a better one, I think, but at what point should a grievance be deemed to be chronic rather than temporary? By this basis, a terrible injustice could be shrugged off as a once-off: Prof. Biggar seems to be suggesting that terrible injustices should be suffered until they’re clearly a chronic phenomenon rather than a passing one.

As for the third one, it’s worth considering how these would work at a micro level, with reference to the old line about ‘when did you stop beating your wife?’ Should a beaten wife stay with a husband who has stopped beating her? Would it be immoral for her to leave?

Not that I think Scotland’s situation is remotely comparable to this, of course, but the fact remains: Prof. Biggar seems to be saying that independence should only be sought by countries at their weakest, suffering serious hardships that they have suffered for generations, but it should be obvious that countries at their weakest are rarely capable of seeking independence.

The Ireland that lost as much as a fifth of its population in the famine of the mid-18th Century and the Ireland that lost a quarter of its population in the famines of the mid-19th Century were, after all, in no position to seek independence. It took generations before it had the strength to do that, and by that point, by Prof. Biggar’s analysis, they had no case to make.

I’m not entirely sure – I’m open to persuasion on this – that a country needs to have ‘grievances’, in any case, if it’s to justify its own independence. It could simply be that a country might think it would do better if it could plough its own furrow, and this is where discussions of the Scottish economy come into play.

Sure, the economic arguments deployed in the 2014 Scottish referendum were rubbish, and I think it should be very clear to us all that an economy based on fluctuating oil prices is not a sustainable economy. However, I wouldn’t blame Scots for looking to a bigger picture.

Back when Ireland – and here I mean the 26 counties of the then Free State, of course – left the UK, it was an economic basket case, an impoverished place with no industry to speak of, an agricultural economy that had been developed to serve the British market, and notoriously high infant mortality rates in Dublin.

Now, though, Ireland’s pretty much the only place in these islands outside London and the English southeast where the economy is healthy. The UK is a notoriously imbalanced economy, such that it would not be an unreasonable lesson for the Scots to draw that Ireland has well because Ireland has broken away from the UK and deliberately adopted economic strategies based around weaning itself off its dependency on England.

This might not be the right lesson to draw, of course, but it is a reasonable one.  

I’d be wary too, for what it’s worth, by Prof. Biggar’s line that Scottish independence might provoke a resentment among the English towards the Scots that they have never before had reason to feel, especially given his acknowledgment that there is a “traditional resentment” towards England in Scotland, though at no point does he show an ounce of interest in why such a resentment might be there.

“Maybe the mutual alienation caused by the dissolution of the Union would have lasted only two or three generations—as in the case of Ireland,” he says. “Maybe, unlike Ireland, no blood would have been shed.”

The thesis seems to be that as long as the Scots keep their heads down, the English are fine with them, and his raising of the spectre of war seems rather at odds with the aim of ‘These Islands’ to put forward a positive case for the continued union of England and Scotland.

And the purposes of the UK?

For Prof. Biggar, the UK is good for three things, which he lists as “the greater external security of liberal democracy, a depth of multinational solidarity of which the European Union can still only dream, and the upholding of a humane international order”.

None of these withstand a huge amount of scrutiny, at least as he outlines them.

His thesis about liberal democracy is based on a handful of historically dubious whiggish bullet points, and ignores how, for instance, the UK’s first-past-the-post electoral system has a habit of returning parliaments are far from representative and governments that arguably lack genuinely democratic legitimacy. That’s not to say that it’s not a system with advantages, but it’s certainly not one that gets held up nowadays as a model for the world.

His point about multinational solidarity might have some merit were it not for how in the Brexit vote an English majority has shown a shameless contempt for the concerns, interests, and simple realities of Scotland, Wales, and especially Northern Ireland.  

In particular, his contrast between London taxpayers subsidising poorer people in those areas with Germans bailing out the crippled Greek and Italian economies following the financial crisis is utterly mendacious. An honest comparison would entail comparing London subsidising the other parts of the UK with the likes of Germany subsidising other parts of the EU through structural funds, the Common Agricultural Policy, and other regular subsidy systems, rather than to massive and exceptional bailouts designed to address crises caused by fiscal irresponsibility and being sought without convincing plans for tackling the crises.

And then there’s the line about a humane international order. Sure, that’s a plausible argument as long as it focuses on, say, Kosovo, sets up straw men about the UN, and doesn’t address things like the invasion of Iraq that has led to countless deaths and the annihilation of Christianity across large swathes of the Middle East.

Praising this, as Prof. Biggar does – and in line with his previous defences of Cecil Rhodes, say –  as “the legacy of Empire” is particularly odious, especially when he trots out clichés about how the British Empire wasn’t so bad, since while it presided over a couple of massacres, “it also pioneered the suppression of the slave trade throughout the 19th Century and was the only major opponent of European fascism in the field from May 1940 until June 1941”, such that its record is simply “morally mixed”, like any nation state.

People need to stop wheeling out this line about how great it was that British Empire pioneered the suppression of the slave trade, given how before it decided to stop it – an effective way of hurting Britain’s French rivals, it’s worth adding – the slave trade had been central to the British economy, with about 40% of all slaves destined for the Atlantic between the 1670s and 1800 being transported on British ships.

As for the rest, things like Amritsar and the Black and Tans weren’t anomalies; in Ireland, just look at the 20th-Century history of North King Street, Dublin’s Bloody Sunday, Ballymurphy, and Derry’s Bloody Sunday, and look at how the perpetrators of such events were protected while the man responsible for Amritsar became a national hero. Look at the Opium Wars. Look at the concentration camps used in the Boer Wars and Kenya, how torture was used in Aden and Cyprus, the Chinese resettlement camps in Malaysia. Look at the wiping out of the Australian aborigines, or the carving up of the Middle East after the defeat of the Ottomans. Look at how agricultural taxes and diversion of supplies exacerbated famines in India with at least 12 million people being thought to have died there because of British policies.

Look, I don’t think the British Empire was uniquely evil as empires go – that’s clearly not true. “Powers will be powers,” as A.J.P Taylor says, and in any case, it’s not as if my own family didn’t play their part in the imperial project, serving as they’ve done in India, the Boer War, the Western Front, Kenya, and Northern Ireland.

But this doesn’t change the fact that the British Empire was a uniquely vast and assiduously exploitative machine for enriching British people at a massive cost to others, and one that was justified time and again by self-serving claims that Britain had a civilizing mission, that the peoples of the colonies simply weren’t ready to rule themselves, and needed British guidance, a claim that enabled Britain to withhold freedom as distant promise and which Prof. Biggar implicitly pushes now with his line that “The United Kingdom shouldn’t kick its post-imperial habit; it should keep it—for the world’s sake.”

No, the United Kingdom needs to find a better way of justifying its continued existence if it wants to persuade those who would leave it. 

After Brexit, what now for the North?

I was troubled last night to read people expressing delight at the huge queues at polling booths across the UK. Such a massive turnout, seemingly, was a triumph for democracy. I wasn't so sure. There's far more to democracy than just casting votes, and those who act as though democracy is something that happens but on rare occasions and purely in the privacy of the polling booth do a disservice to democracy. 

If democracy is to mean anything -- if our votes are to mean anything -- we have to participate in an informed way. I was pretty sure that wasn't happening: how valuable are votes cast on the basis of a mythical £350m a week, or to ward off Turkish accession, or in the belief that EU laws are made by unelected bureaucrats, or that there's no way to remove the European Commission from office, or because of the belief that British fishing collapsed when it joined the EEC, or any of a host of other lies? 

The 'Leave' campaigners lied and lied egregiously throughout the Brexit referendum campaign, and did so tapping into decades of popular poison from the British press, and if lots of people who've long felt disenfranchised and ignored should have been willing to go along with this kind of stuff, well, maybe that should have been expected.

I've less sympathy for others, for those who take the pains to be informed of things they care about, but who on other issues prefer instead to listen simply to those whose political views conveniently tally with their own judgments and to shout down calls for them to inform themselves as mere elitism.

So for those who make much of their pro-life credentials, and who dismissed my concerns and those of others about the lives and livelihoods of those in Northern Ireland being actively endangered by a vote to quit the EU, here are just a handful of things they might look before they next put themselves forward to speak as Catholics or pro-lifers, or even just look in the mirror.

Not for nothing has The Irish Times said, "Of all the things that could happen to an Irish government short of the outbreak of war, this is pretty much up there with the worst of them."

Then there was The Guardian a couple of days back, observing that, "Great Britain may be able to weather a Brexit, but Northern Ireland simply cannot."

Lucinda Creighton may not be everyone's cup of tea, but she had a point when she said the other day that, "Brexit poses the greatest threat to the Northern Irish Peace Process since the Good Friday Agreement was signed in 1998."  

For a more cautious take, unsurprisingly from a pro-Brexit paper, The Telegraph warned, "The scenario of the UK leaving the European Union, when a majority of the population of Northern Ireland have opted to remain (and especially if there has been a decisive vote in favour among the nationalist community), may exacerbate tensions, fuel demands for a border poll on Irish unification and challenge the durability of the peace process."  

Then we have from the Centre on Constitutional Change the observation that "a British exit from the EU risks undermining the very self-determination and national sovereignty that its adherents believe it will bring about", continuing, "This is because it risks shattering the fragile balance and stability of the UK by threatening the peace settlement in Northern Ireland ".  

Onetime MEP Brendan Donnelly wrote from the London School of Economics, meanwhile, that "it is clear that much potential exists for the destabilisation of Northern Ireland through a vote to leave the EU on 23 June", continuing, "The Good Friday agreement is under more strain from a currently low level of sectarian violence than is sometimes appreciated".  

At the Euractiv site, Paul Brannan hammers this home when he says, "with politics in Northern Ireland already on the brink of breakdown and the Good Friday Agreement in jeopardy, a UK EU exit threatens a total collapse of the peace process".

And for those who think Britain can keep the show on the road, as though it's taken seriously as an honest broker and was never known as 'perfidious Albion', The New Statesman points out: "Funnily enough, the same people who don't trust Britain to administer the peace process would also be unhappy with the EU leaving that process."

I could say more, but that'll do for now. Words seem unlikely to do any good now the die is cast.

Final Week Brexit Thoughts II - The Threat to Northern Ireland

About a week or so back Catholic Voices hosted a debate in London in which two speakers gave impressive speeches on why the UK should remain in the European Union and two argued in similarly impressive fashion to the effect that the UK should leave the Union. 

Better-humoured, more honest, more thoughtful and broader-minded than almost all engagements I've read or witnessed on the topic, the debate on the motion "This house believes that Catholic values are best served by remaining in the European Union" was nonetheless striking for a complete absence of references to the single most Catholic part of the UK, that being Northern Ireland.

According to 2011 figures, 40.8% of the Northern Irish population is Catholic. This stands in stark contrast to England and Wales, for instance, where, if Steven Bullivant is right, just 13.7% of the population say they were raised Catholic, with a mere 8.3% of the population holding to the Faith now.

I appreciate the Brexit debate is really an 'Exit' debate in that the discussion is primarily driven by English concerns and will be decided by English votes, with the lesser partners in the UK at best hoping to tip the scales if an English vote is finely balanced, but I think that English voters should at least give some thought to how their votes are likely to affect things beyond England.

Northern Ireland's bishops have, of course, warned of the dangers of a Brexit to the North, and their concerns seem shared by Northern Ireland's Catholics. A Millward Brown poll in early June found that 70% of Northern Catholics were in favour of the UK remaining in the EU, with a mere 12% advocating that the UK quit the Union. A more recent Ipsos Mori poll has shown just 56% of Catholics in favour of remaining in the Union, though again a mere 12% seem to back a Brexit. 

Dividing countries the hard way

Such low support for withdrawal from the Union is understandable in a region where the UK's only land border is to be found, and where there has never really been a traditional border: for centuries, after all, Ireland was united under one form or other of British rule, and even after the Irish War of Independence it was possible for people to cross back and forth without a passport. Under the UK's 1949 Ireland Act Irish people are not considered aliens in British law, and the soft and porous nature of the border has been vital for the North's economy. It's not really surprising that people in the border counties especially might not be looking forward to this ending.

Of course, it's far from obvious that a hard border will be imposed between Ireland and the UK within the island of Ireland. Given the realities of Irish roads, about 200 of which cross the border, and how farms and fields straddle the boundary, it's hard to see how any border within Ireland, even one policed by border guards and soldiers, could bar from the UK anyone really intent on crossing over. And given that immigration fears are utterly central to Britain's EU debate, this is a question that needs pondering.

Cameron engaged with this in the Commons last week, when he answered a question from the SDLP's Alasdair McDonnell by saying that following Brexit there would have to be a hard border. "Therefore," he said, "you can only have new border controls between the Republic and Northern Ireland or, which I would regret hugely, you would have to have some sort of checks on people as they left Belfast or other parts of Northern Ireland to come to the rest of the United Kingdom."

I suspect that in practical terms a functional EU/non-EU border would have to be not in Ireland but between Britain and Northern Ireland, thus splitting the UK and making the Northern Irish second-class citizens, as the alternative would be bringing in checkpoints on dozens of Irish roads with soldiers patrolling the lands and minor roads between them, all of which would be likely to require the kind of security apparatus likely to fire up the republicans again, inviting a return to the kind of protracted low-intensity civil war that previous blighted the North.

Impoverishing the Six Counties

Even aside from the technical issue of the border, there's a high chance that a Brexit vote would impoverish Northern Ireland. Farm subsidies are regional expenditures, and it's striking that Northern Ireland's farmers receive four times the amount of EU subsidies than do England's ones. 80% of Northern dairy produce is exported, and when pondering this people need to remember that no part of the UK exports a higher proportion of its exports to other parts of the EU than does Northern Ireland. Any kind of border would hurt that, as would any imposition of tariffs and any hindering of the currently free trading arrangements. Tariffs on dairy imports to the EU, it's worth pointing out, average 36%.

The EU has played an absolutely crucial role in the Northern Irish peace process, of course, with John Hume detailing in his 1998 Nobel Prize acceptance speech how he had been hugely inspired in his work for peace by his European experience.

"I always tell this story," he said, "and I do so because it is so simple yet so profound and so applicable to conflict resolution anywhere in the world. On my first visit to Strasbourg in 1979 as a member of the European Parliament. I went for a walk across the bridge from Strasbourg to Kehl. Strasbourg is in France. Kehl is in Germany. They are very close. I stopped in the middle of the bridge and I meditated. There is Germany. There is France. If I had stood on this bridge 30 years ago after the end of the Second World War when 25 million people lay dead across our continent for the second time in this century and if I had said: 'Don't worry. In 30 years' time we will all be together in a new Europe, our conflicts and wars will be ended and we will be working together in our common interests', I would have been sent to a psychiatrist."  

"But it has happened," he continued, "and it is now clear that European Union is the best example in the history of the world of conflict resolution and it is the duty of everyone, particularly those who live in areas of conflict to study how it was done and to apply its principles to their own conflict resolution." 

"All conflict is about difference, whether the difference is race, religion or nationality," he said, continuing, "The European visionaries decided that difference is not a threat, difference is natural. Difference is of the essence of humanity. Difference is an accident of birth and it should therefore never be the source of hatred or conflict. The answer to difference is to respect it. Therein lies a most fundamental principle of peace - respect for diversity."

"The peoples of Europe then created institutions which respected their diversity - a Council of Ministers, the European Commission and the European Parliament - but allowed them to work together in their common and substantial economic interest. They spilt their sweat and not their blood and by doing so broke down the barriers of distrust of centuries and the new Europe has evolved and is still evolving, based on agreement and respect for difference," he said, before declaring, "That is precisely what we are now committed to doing in Northern Ireland."

Fine words? Sure, but accurate ones too, and not merely has the European project, with its dedication through most of its history to peace-building through calling people of different communities to work together, inspired peace in the North, but it has underpinned it too. 

As the Ulster Unionist MEP Jim Nicholson wrote the other day, "I will always remember when, in October 1994, just as the loyalist ceasefire was announced, Ian Paisley, John Hume and I met with then European Commission president Jacques Delors. He shared our optimism that Northern Ireland would move to a new beginning away from violence and pledged EU financial support. And he was true to his word -- weeks later, £240m of European funding for peace-building in Northern Ireland was approved. By 2020, Northern Ireland and the border region of the Republic will have received more than €2bn in PEACE funding alone.

PEACE funding only makes up one part of the money the North draws down from Europe, Nicholson continued, and the truth is that the EU has largely rebuilt Northern Ireland since the ceasefires began. Northern Irish prosperity, and Northern Irish peace, in no small part depend on the EU.

(Of course, the EU has done a huge amount in general to support those parts of the UK furthest from London; whether London lets them languish and runs the UK for the benefit of the English South-east you can mull over for yourselves.)

Explicitly undermining the Good Friday Agreement

Those who might doubt that a vote for Brexit is a vote to destabilise Northern Ireland should look too at the Good Friday Agreement, which explicitly rests on the fact of the UK and Ireland being "partners in the European Union".

The North-South Ministerial Council envisages the Northern and Republican governments working together -- at a local level, for those who doubt that subsidiarity matters to the modern EU -- on a range of such necessarily EU-related matters as agriculture, the environment, tourism, transport, and the management and oversight of EU programmes through Ireland's National Development Plan and Northern Ireland's Structural Funds Plan.

It's hard to see how this strand of the agreement can work if Northern Ireland is no longer in the EU, and since the Northern Assembly is explicitly described in the agreement as "mutually interdependent" with the Council, it looks as though withdrawal from the EU could endanger the entire Northern settlement.

And that's not even getting into how under the agreement everyone in Northern Ireland is entitled simultaneously to be citizens of the UK and Ireland, such that following a Brexit they could -- on the face of it -- both be citizens of the EU and non-citizens of the EU. I'm not sure how how much thought's been given in the Brexit camp to Schroedinger's Ulstermen.

Overall, a Brexit vote is a vote to risk instability, poverty, and civil war in Northern Ireland. It's not really surprising that the Northern bishops and the vast majority of Northern Catholics are opposed to it. It baffles me how many in England seem not to care in the least about this. 

Island of Merciful Liberation

The glorious weather that baked Lough Derg during the first week of the pilgrimage season was a stark contrast, according to the sanctuary’s Prior, Fr Owen McEneaney, to that experienced last summer. “We had rather inclement weather with very low temperatures – almost zero temperatures – at night and heavy rain,” he says, “but just being about the place today and yesterday, it’s a very different experience.”

While he says “the Lough Derg experience can be enhanced by the fine weather” and observes that “there’s a great buzz about the place” he stresses that bad weather tends not to deter the island sanctuary’s regular pilgrims.

 “The stay on the island can be a lot more pleasant in good weather, that’s for sure,” he says, “but it’s a much deeper experience for many of them, and if the pilgrims come back each year, I think a lot of them see it as their annual retreat.”

Many such pilgrims often aren’t able to take more than a couple of days off, he says, sometimes even having to fight hard to get that time, but with prior experience of the island they know to trust and value the pilgrimage experience. Such regular pilgrims, he says, tend to see the summer as incomplete without their three days on Lough Derg, such that once Easter has passed they tend to look forward to the pilgrimage, making space for it in their lives.

Not that everyone on the island is an old hand at Lough Derg; Fr Owen says that over the first few days of the new season he’d spoken to several of the island’s first-time pilgrims. Explaining why new pilgrims come, he says: “Some of them, perhaps, out of curiosity, they’ve heard about it, but perhaps it’s more their friend, their work colleague, their relative, their family members saying ‘I think you should give it a try’.”

Now in his third season looking after the sanctuary, but with experience of working there as a priest in the 1990s and having first done the pilgrimage himself after his Leaving Cert in the late 1970s, introduced to it by his mother who herself had been a regular pilgrim, he says that regardless of whether pilgrims are experienced or new to the island, the same processes tend to be witnessed among them.

“When you notice the pilgrims coming on any particular day – and some of them have travelled a journey – they go the dormitory, they take off the shoes, and they come up the island, heading towards the basilica to begin their stations, moving at a great pace because their bare feet have just touched the paving stones, but as the hours pass even on that first day, I notice them beginning to slow down, as a rhythm takes hold of them,” he says.

 “And when they move on to the penitential beds, and it was particularly noticeable yesterday and the day before, a large number of people were all just circling the beds and each praying away, mindful of each other and each making sure not to bump up against one another, you could almost see them moving towards a still centre in themselves,” he continues.

“For some of them that would be a very troubled centre, but supported I would feel by the other pilgrims around them and having a sense, of course, that when you take off the shoes you’re walking on holy ground – this island was made holy by the thousands upon thousands of pilgrims who have come here.”

Tentatively describing the island as “an uncontaminated place”, Fr Owen maintains that the Lough Derg experience is very much in line with Pope Francis’ vision for the Jubilee Year of Mercy, noting how “the mercy theme has been carried in many of the liturgies”, and pointing both to the Door of Mercy which the papal nuncio, Archbishop Charles Brown, opened in May and to the basilica’s threshold stone bearing the biblically-inspired words “I am the door, enter and be safe”.

“One element that has been very clear,” he says, “is that Lough Derg – St Patrick’s Sanctuary – has always been a place that has welcomed people in terms of coming to unburden themselves and particularly in the Sacrament of Reconciliation. This is not new for us.”

Describing how the sacrament is celebrated on the morning of the three-day pilgrimage’s second day, he says “pilgrims have the time to come and if they wish they can bear their soul in the knowledge that they’ll be well-received – welcomed – but it’s more than the welcome the priest will extend, it’s the mercy, the forgiveness, the love of God.”

Given this, Fr Eamonn Conway’s new book, Lough Derg: Island of Quiet Miracles, is aptly named, Fr Owen says. “It’s no exaggeration to say we have been humbled as priests celebrating the sacrament here on the island in the morning time, humbled by just what happens before our very eyes.

“You can see people just experiencing that transformation as they name something that has been a burden to them,” he continues, “They may have come in the past intending to name it, but didn’t manage to do that, but when the time is right, they do.”

Even those few non-Christians who visit the island “just blend in and experience it and make their own of it”, he says, but for Christians the island truly represents a much deeper reality. Describing how he makes a point of bidding farewell to departing pilgrims as they leave the island on the third day, he says, “They’ve had a night’s sleep, they have completed the pilgrimage, and that in itself would engender a good feeling, but I know from being here these three seasons and again in the past, it’s a spiritual reality, a spiritual encounter for many of them who would see it in terms of meeting with the Lord Jesus.”

( A version of this was first published in The Irish Catholic newspaper of 9 June 2016)

A Reluctant Transformation

Back in 1841 one Caesar Otway, a traveller in Mayo, wrote in scorn of a lake in the area, saying it compared to his mind with Donegal’s Lough Derg, a place, he said, “where superstition disgraces what nature has made but ugly”.

It’s hard to imagine a more unfair comment in respect either of the lake’s beauty or the value of the three-day pilgrimage for which its Station Island is famous, and perhaps if the aforementioned Anglican had tried the latter he might have taken a very different line.

Though curious, I was a somewhat reluctant pilgrim to the island, having agreed to do the pilgrimage last year only after two of my colleagues here at The Irish Catholic came back from Lough Derg invigorated and bubbling over with stories of their experience. Since then it loomed ever nearer in my calendar, with my ambivalence about the pilgrimage not fading as the date drew closer. That in the end it was set to fall immediately after a week’s holidays seemed a rather cruel joke; yes, of course I’d be enjoying myself in my time off, but did that really merit such a penance?

Getting to the island by public transport couldn’t have been simpler, Bus Eireann taking me from Dublin to Enniskillen where I and other pilgrims from around the country boarded a shuttle bus to the lakeshore, there to collect tickets and a leaflet before stepping onto the fast ferry over to the island.

It wasn’t long before I was settled there, my bag on my dorm bed and my shoes under it, as I headed barefoot towards the penitential beds to get a look at what the island really involved. Astounded at how many pilgrims were already doing circuits of them, I went into the basilica with my leaflet to make a start on my first station.

I’d be lying if I said I didn’t find that first station as contrived as I did difficult: kneeling, standing, walking, with one prayer here, three prayers there all adding up to 94 Our Fathers, 157 Hail Marys, 27 Apostles’ Creeds, and one psalm, all barefoot and especially on the first two penitential beds on ground that was far from easy to walk on, even in fine, dry conditions – it all felt like a devotional obstacle course, and one that didn’t seem to make a lot of sense.

That said, over the last few years one thing I’ve learned to do is to trust processes, and with 1,500 years of history behind it, there’s clearly something special about the Lough Derg exercises, so as I tried to balance when kneeling on irregular rocks, quite literally clinging to the Cross to stay upright, I embraced the devotions. They’d make sense eventually. They did.

The second and third exercises were slower, more solitary, in a sense easier, even if I was plagued by midges, and the four stations conducted within the basilica through the night posed other challenges again – exhaustion and hunger meant that these exercises took on a trance-like quality.

Between exercises there was a startling warmth and camaraderie, with pilgrims gathered in the Flood Room next door to chat, support each other, tell stories of the island and their lives, and gain some manner of sustenance from cups of hot water, often flavoured with sprinklings of salt and pepper. Pilgrimages are so often imagined as dour and puritanical things, but only by those who’ve never been on one or even thought of how Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales was inspired by the banter and storytelling of pilgrims making their way to the tomb of St Thomas Becket.

Morning came, and with it Mass, where exhausted heads struggled to stay upright, and then a Reconciliation service and Confession, transformative for so many over the years, before I began my eighth station. Circling the basilica as I said decade after decade of the Rosary I called to mind so many people – friends, family, the newly born and the long dead, those I’ve wronged and those who’ve wronged me, deliberately recalling them as best I could before tackling the penitential beds.

It took all I had to manage the prayers at this point, fatigue mingling words and setting them to unexpected and unlikely rhythms, but eventually I finished my station and spent the rest of the day, the Way of the Cross aside, listening to other pilgrims tell me why the island matters to them so much.

Sleep couldn’t have been more welcome that night, with a horde of pilgrims sighing with gratitude as the vigil candle was extinguished and they raced off to bed.

And so on the third day on the island we rose again, and as we joined in the Mass delighted and alert, it began to be obvious why the Apostles’ Creed seems so right for the island’s exercises: in its line “he descended into Hell” it hammers home the reality of Easter and the time between Our Lord’s suffering and his resurrection. The final station was almost impossibly beautiful, as this time I didn’t even need to think of who I wanted to pray for as face after face appeared in my mind, not as a pell-mell confused rush, but serenely, one by one, prayer after prayer, unbidden and unrepeated.

When I left the island I was smiling like everyone else, and as I’d been told, it was less with relief than with gratitude. Will I be back? I’m not saying no.

(A version of this was originally published in The Irish Catholic of 9 June 2016)

Charlie: It's Not All About Us

It's been very strange watching some Irish responses online to the week's horrific events in Paris.

 

Following the murders at the offices of Charlie Hebdo, and subsequent hostage-taking and killings elsewhere, far too many people have seen this as a suitable time to demand that Ireland's 'blasphemy laws' should be repealed, and to scorn as hypocritical the Irish Times' criticism of the murderers' attempts to silence debate, given how our self-proclaimed 'paper of reference' once removed a cartoon from its archives.

 

Now, you might just think this kind of behaviour is just cynical opportunism, or is typical of that clueless parochial narcissism that so often blights our national discourse, and you might well be right, but it's worth looking at both issues separately for a moment.

 

 

Comparing Like with Loike, Totally

Just to take one example, Ed Moloney, one of the finest analysts of the Northern Irish Troubles and Peace Process, for instance, tweeted last night, 'When Will The Irish Times Remember The Cartoon It Censored At The Behest Of Religious Fanatics?'

 

Writing about this on his blog, where after some reflection he changed his headline from one identical to the tweet to one saying, 'Irish Times Leads Nation’s Protest Over "Charlie" But Forgets About Cartoon It Censored At Behest Of The Bishops,' he quotes the Irish Times's comment that 'The right to offend must be defended with courage and vigour', before saying that it would have been more 'uplifting' if the Irish Times editorial had expressed regret for how it had removed from its archives a Martin Turner cartoon because, he said, it had offended senior members of the Irish Catholic hierarchy.

 

'It seems,' he concludes, 'that sauce for the Catholic goose is not sauce for the Islamic gander.'

 

Now. Moloney's a smart man, and on the face of it you might think he's making a fair point. It's worth taking a look at the cartoon, though, which we can easily do because, well, it's not 1904, and things tend to end up online about two minutes after newspapers remove them. 

 

(For instance, do you remember in October 2004 when the Guardian removed from its archives a Charlie Brooker 'Screen Burn' column that ended by lamenting the probability of George W. Bush being reelected president, and said 'John Wilkes Booth, Lee Harvey Oswald,  John Hinckley Jr -- where are you now that we need you?' No?

 

Well, perhaps you remember how in August 2013, the Irish Times ran a front page piece about a twin pregnancy being terminated at the National Maternity Hospital as the first termination conducted under the terms of the Protection of Life during Pregnancy Act? Remember? You should: it was such an impressively detailed report that Peter Boylan, who was reportedly involved in the termination, spluttered about how the patient's confidentiality had been breached, and yet it was utterly revoked and wiped from the paper's archives a week later, with a small and inappropriately discreet page seven apology pointing out that the law was not yet in force, and claiming that 'The hospital has pointed out that the case described in the article did not happen.'

 

If you don't remember either of these peculiar episodes, well, don't worry, because this is 2015, and so I've kindly given you links to the missing stories. And then, if you really have an issue with censorship, go and write to the said papers to complain about their willingness to bow to, I dunno, angry politicians and embarrassing obstetricians. Or something.)

 

So, anyway, here's the Turner cartoon, the removal of which so irks Mr Moloney, because, of course, an Irish publication freely deciding to withdraw a cartoon while retaining the services of its cartoonist is comparable to a load of cartoonists and other magazine staff being butchered.

It is, we should start by conceding, not a very good cartoon. It's a leaden thing, where three priests, all rather surprisingly wearing what I presume are meant to be cassocks*, and one stepping out of a confessional box rather perplexingly wearing an alb as well as his stole, sing 'I would do anything for children (but I won't do that)'.

 

Presumably this is to the tune of Meatloaf's seminal return hit, 'I would do anything for love (but I won't do that)'**, though if you can get the priests' line to scan to the original tune you're a better man than I am.

 

In case you're too thick to realise that this was intended as a comment on Catholic opposition to one element in the child protection laws being introduced at the time, one of the priests -- presumably singing with his mouth closed -- is scowling down at a newspaper running the headline 'Children First Bill: Mandatory Reporting'. As an English friend pointed out the other day in a more general context, if you feel the need to include newspaper headlines to spell out what your cartoon is about, you've probably not done a very good cartoon.

And, of course, if you don't see the significance of Catholics taking issue with a particular proposal that might limit freedom of religion in return for nothing that would actually protect children, and if you're not willing to concede that the Church in Ireland has -- so, so, belatedly -- been pretty much the leader in Irish child protection over the last decade or so, and if you don't have a problem with government ministers crowing about this proposal while actual experts in child protection point out that the planned legislation wouldn't help anyone and was being conducted in tandem with policies that would endanger children, well, then you're probably not very bright, not very well informed, or just not really interested in protecting children at all.

 

The day after the cartoon appeared, there were two letters in the paper, both from priests, one describing the cartoon as 'bigoted, nasty and downright disgraceful', pointing out that given the Church has more stringent child protection guidelines than any other body in Ireland, it was a cheap shot and a betrayal of anti-Catholic bigotry to 'use the sins of the past as a stick to continue to beat the church of the present', while the other describe it as 'offensive in the extreme to every priest in the country', and required an editorial apology unless the paper was of the view that it was 'open season on priests'.

The following day there were four letters about the cartoon, one of which said the cartoon was below the belt, but that as a satirical cartoonist it was Turner's job to be offensive. The other three were less understanding. One described the cartoon as 'a new low in Irish journalism', reminiscent of the sectarian cartoons of the nineteenth-century American Thomas Nast. Another, from a long-time fan of Turner, said the cartoon was 'bigoted', 'nasty', and 'spectacularly unfunny', revealing a potent double standard where the paper's general 'zeal for anti-religious comment' was not being 'applied to critical analysis of current government scandals'. A third, from a reader of the 55 years, described the cartoon's publication as 'an error of judgement' that warranted an apology to Ireland's priests and the paper's readers.

 

That same day, speaking in Dublin's pro-Cathedral, Diarmuid Martin, the Archbishop of Dublin, said 'I am a strong believer in freedom of speech and of the vital role of satire in social criticism, but I object to anything that would unjustly tarnish all good priests with the unpardonable actions of some.'
 

What was the problem? Well, if you look down in the cartoon's bottom corner, in very small writing, you'll see an authorial aside saying, 'But there is little else you can do for them... except stay away from them, of course.'

 

Bear that in mind, when you read the Irish Times editorial that made clear why the cartoon was removed. The editorial states that the paper is bound by the Irish Times Trust's principles which require that the paper is meant to ensure that comment and opinion should be 'informed and responsible', with 'special consideration ... given to the reasonable representation of minority interests and divergent views, and that and it should uphold  'the promotion of peace and tolerance and opposition to all forms of violence and hatred, so that each man may live in harmony with his neighbour, considerate for his cultural, material and spiritual needs.'

 

No, really. No laughing at the back there.

 

'That means, however, that there is no carte blanche,' the editorial explained, 'and that there are ground rules which we try to adhere to, mostly with no argument from those contributors. Civilised debate, we accept, requires the eschewing of ad hominem argument, playing the ball, not the man, and avoiding crude stereotyping.'

Turner's cartoon was described as having flown under the editorial radar, the editorial explained, picking up on the authorial aside about how priests should keep away from children. 'In making a legitimate argument about the debate over priestly responsibility for reporting child abuse and the concerns for the seal of the confessional, Turner also took an unfortunate and unjustified sideswipe at all priests, suggesting that none of them can be trusted with children. This has, unsurprisingly, caused considerable offence and we regret and apologise for the hurt caused by the cartoon whose use in that form, we acknowledge, reflected a regrettable editorial lapse.'

 

The Turner thing was very simple. The Irish Times has its own guidelines, Turner breached them by irresponsibly and ignorantly casting all priests as dangers to children -- and if you think this is a fair comment on the phenomenon of abuse in Ireland, you really should read more --  and so the paper pulled it. To make out that this has broader implications would be as outrageous as me saying that because my school magazine was once pulled from distribution because of a story I had done in it, so nobody at that school should ever be allowed to take issue with cartoonists being murdered.

 

It really is that simple.

Blas for me! Blas for you! Blas for everybody in the room!

Then there's the blasphemy law thing. It's probably worth starting with the fact that I don't much care either way about the blasphemy law, such as it is: it doesn't bother me, and it wouldn't bother me if it were removed. I don't know any Catholics who are fans of it, to be honest. Some are opposed to it, and many wouldn't even bother shrugging if it were removed.

Now, the standard line about the blasphemy law over the last few years that it should be removed because it encourages Muslim countries to introduce similar blasphemy laws has been tweaked in the last week to the effect that 'Because of Ireland's blasphemy law, Charlie Hebdo wouldn't even be allowed in Ireland!' As such, so fools argue, we should remove the blasphemy law as a mark of respect and as a way of championing real free speech.

It's worth bearing in mind where the blasphemy law came from. A constitutional quirk basically requires the state to have some kind of blasphemy law, but Ireland's politicians sat on this legal oddity for ages, without people jumping up and down and claiming that they had to give legislative force to a constitutional imperative. Eventually, though, when tidying up issues of libel and slander and such in 2009's Defamation Act, the issue of other limitations on speech came up. The result was the so-called 'blasphemy law', better known to those who read as section 36 of the Defamation Act.

Section 36 says that those who publish or utter blasphemous matter can be subject to a fine of up to €25,000. Matter should be deemed blasphemous, if says, if a) it is "grossly abusive or insulting in relation to matters held sacred by any religion, thereby causing outrage among a substantial number of the adherents of that religion" AND b) if the causing of such outrage is intended.

That bit about intent is crucial, and not just because it is half the definition of blasphemy, such that in Irish law you cannot blaspheme unless you have deliberately caused large-scale outrage. The law goes on to say that it is a defence to allegations of blasphemy for a reasonable person to find 'genuine literary, artistic, political, scientific, or academic value in the matter to which the offence relates'.

In other words, the law has a three-part test: has the matter under investigation caused outrage among a significant number of people of a particular religious line, was it intended to cause such outrage, and is it bereft of literary, artistic, scientific, academic, or political merit?

To all intents and purposes it's a deliberately toothless law, designed to tidy up a constitutional glitch in such a way that nobody is ever troubled by it, and surely pretty much unnecessary given how the actual crime here seems to be substantively covered by 1989's Incitement to Hatred law.  You might take issue with its symbolism, or feel it's anachronistic, but one thing you can't really do is say that it does any actual harm. Our laws are often merely aspirational; this isn't even that.

Michael Nugent and his friends in Atheist Ireland disagree, of course, and regard it as a great betrayal that the government doesn't see its removal from the statute books asap as a massive priority. But then, of course, Atheist Ireland has never really understood the law. When the law was first instituted, they ran a list of 25 supposedly blasphemous quotations, daring the State to prosecute them. Of course, leaving aside now many of the quotations could be said to have had literary, artistic, political, scientific, or academic value, and that their publication in 2009 did not provoke large-scale outrage -- nobody cared -- the simple fact of the list having been published to make a political point about free speech meant it was clearly safe from prosecution.

Could Charlie be published in Ireland? Well, put it this way: was it intended to provoke anger among Muslims or Catholics or whoever or was it intended to make people think? To take a non-religious example***, is the accompanying cartoon a homophobic or racist piece designed to anger gay people or black people, or is its aim to get people to think about the socio-economic realities surrogacy can entail, with poor women, often from developing countries, being paid to serve as vessels for others' children?

'Surrogacy is two parents... and one slave.'

No, I think, Charlie certainly could be published in Ireland. Whether shops would want to stock it, or people would want to buy it... that's a different matter.

 

There's no getting away from the fact that the intentional provocation of large scale outrage is a central element in Ireland's blasphemy law; it's a law less about offending God, as in other blasphemy laws, as about deliberately angering people. This matters if we want to think about the trope that Muslim countries, especially Pakistan, like using Ireland's blasphemy law to justify their own similar laws.

Do they really do this?

 

Now, I might be wrong, I've only ever really heard of one instance of this happening, and even then it's a pretty dubious instance. At an October 2009 meeting of the UN's Human Rights Council, discussing discrimination, Pakistan entered a six-part proposal to oppose discrimination based on religion and belief. The first of these six propositions was clearly modelled on part of the Irish definition of legal blasphemy: 'State parties shall prohibit by law the uttering of matters that are grossly abusive or insulting in relation to matters held sacred by any religion, thereby causing outrage among a substantial number of adherents to that religion.'

So, yes, clearly based in part on the Irish one. And yet also spectacularly different from the toothless Irish law, because it utterly omits the role of intent in Ireland's law, that crucial point which means that you cannot blaspheme accidentally or inadvertently, that blasphemy must not merely be offensive, but must deliberately cause large-scale outrage, and that even should large-scale outrage deliberately be caused, there are a range of legitimate defences, including 'I intended to provoke large-scale outrage, but I was engaged in scholarly research and was telling the truth', and 'I intended to provoke large-scale outrage, but I did so in an aesthetically pleasing way', and 'I intended to provoke large-scale outrage, but I was making a point about free speech'.

The Pakistani proposal entailed using a truncated version of the Irish definition, and tried to promote that. It did not explicitly acknowledge the Irish law, and its proposal was crucially different from the Irish reality, except as misrepresented by, for instance, Atheist Ireland, which falsely states on its Blasphemy.ie website that 'The law defines blasphemy as publishing or saying something "grossly abusive or insulting in relation to matter held sacred by any religion, thereby causing outrage among a substantial number of the adherents of that religion."'

No it doesn't, you buffoons. Please learn to read.

It is disappointing that oafs and otherwise smart people like Ed Moloney have tried to draw links between a responsible editorial decision and brutal acts of murder, just as it is disappointing that others claim Pakistan uses Ireland's blasphemy law to push for blasphemy laws elsewhere and present part of Ireland's legal definition of blasphemy as though it's the whole definition.

 

But that's the thing about free speech: it allows people to say stupid things.

 

Now if you'll excuse me, I have some work to do.

 

 

 

* It looks rather as though they're wearing mysterious black night-shirts over lighter-coloured shirts with clerical collars. It's almost as though Turner has never seen a cassock and doesn't actually know what one looks like. Whether such basic ignorance might somehow undermine his point I leave to you to decide.

** Yeah, I know that's not the actual video. Watch it anyway, though. It may prove an education.

*** Because I don't see much virtue in republishing things I know many people would be upset by for the sake of making a broader, if somewhat self-aggrandising, point about the importance of free speech. That strikes me as doing something bad in the hope of achieving something good, and, well, there are forbidden weapons.